Many video compression techniques, e.g., MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC, use block-based motion compensated transform coding. These approaches attempt to adapt block size to content for spatial and temporal prediction, with DCT transform coding of the residual. Although efficient coding can be achieved, limitations on block size and blocking artifacts can often affect performance. What is needed is a framework that allows for coding of the video that can be better adapted to the local image content for efficient coding and improved visual perception.